Remember When: The Voice of the Avant-Garde

Imagine a kitchen in Paris where the air smells of roasted chicken and the walls are covered in original Picassos. Two women sat at the center of the world's most influential artistic salon, quietly rewriting the rules of what a family could look like while the rest of the world looked the other way.

Alice B. Toklas was born on April 30, 1877. History often remembers her as the companion of Gertrude Stein, but she was a formidable force in her own right — a memoirist, an editor, and a pioneer of queer visibility decades before the term existed. She left San Francisco for Paris in 1907 and built her life there, openly, with Stein at her side.

Their partnership was both revolutionary and remarkably domestic. They hosted the giants of the "Lost Generation," from Hemingway to Matisse, but it was Alice who managed the door and the delicate egos of the men who shaped twentieth-century art. And when France fell to the Nazis, the two of them — Jewish, lesbian, American — did not flee. They retreated to a small village in the French countryside and waited the war out together, refusing to disappear from a regime built on the erasure of people exactly like them.

After Stein's death, Alice stepped into the light on her own. Her memoirs revealed a sharp wit and an unsentimental record of the life they had built. She lived openly at a time when doing so was a punishable offense — and refused to apologize for any of it.

Alice B. Toklas reminds us that the right to love who we choose and live as we are is the cornerstone of a free society. Leading Ladies Vote stands for the protection of LGBTQ+ rights and the dignity of every partnership. Her legacy is our power to live without apology.